Better Days

So before you all start calling bullshit on me, I guess I should actually explain how I got into this situation to begin with. I suppose it all started several months ago, when we first found this place. The Bunker.

Onewinged was an old friend of mine, we’d gotten together over a weekend for a bit of a hiking expedition into the nearby countryside a couple miles out of the city. It was pretty much walking distance for me, since I already lived on the outskirts of town, but I don’t get out much on my own, so he had to drag out me outside for the fresh air. Not that I mind the outdoors, I just don’t have a lot of time for enjoying nature since my college days started up a few years back. I welcomed the excuse to escape for a few hours, so away we went into the forests. We weren’t really looking for anything at the time, just out wandering about in the wilderness. Exploring. Having a good time.

We stumbled across it by total accident... or else some kind of miracle. I mean, it had to be. There was just this huge burnt out clearing and a door in the side of a hill. Like... some sort of secret fantasy location that just didn’t seem like it belonged to the real world. We HAD to investigate. We tugged open the door with hardly a second thought and climbed into the abyss before us. The place was in pretty bad shape when we found it. I couldn’t begin to fathom how long it must have been there. I just knew it was fucking awesome. And Onewinged agreed.

To say we started acting like kids again would be an understatement. We’d just found a secret hideout in the middle of the freaking woods. This was like something out of a dream. But somebody had to know about this thing, right? Things like that don’t just appear over night. So Onewinged took a few shots of the place with his camera phone and said he’d head over to city hall later in the week and see if there were any records on the place.

According to the research he turned up with a few days later, it turns out there used to be a big house nearby. I can’t remember all the details, but apparently some rich big wigs used to own the property, had the shelter installed during the cold war era, but never really put it to much use. Then one night several years ago, the house caught fire and just burned to the ground. Nobody was inside at the time. Investigators blamed it on faulty electrical wiring. For some reason though the family decided not to rebuild. They just moved on to greener pastures somewhere deeper south, left the ruins of their former home to smolder and rot. Years passed and the place just sort of surrendered to nature and the passage of time. Nothing left to even suggest that people had lived out there, save for that lone door buried in the earth. The whole place was just abandoned.

Which for us... was absolutely perfect.

Onewinged started playing with this grand scheme for secret hideout right away. Our home away from home. An escape from the ordinary. Or, more likely, just a cool place to invite girls to late at night and throw sweet underground parties for friends.

Yeah. It was dumb. But we were two dumb college kids, looking to have some fun in what was an otherwise mundane world. So it wasn’t long before we started working to clean the place out and make it into something presentable. “We” of course being a bit of a deceptive phrase in this instance, as Onewinged really only ever made one trip back to the shelter with me, to take some measurements and work out a plan... after that, classes started back up and he got to be “too busy” to work on it himself, so I became tasked with managing the project. I was the big bad engineering guy after all, as he liked to say.

And, okay, that’s true. I’m an engineer. Or at least I am according to that silly slip of paper I left back at home. But I’m an “Electrical Engineer” damnit. I didn’t get into this trade to restructure a concrete hole in the ground… or to be a freaking maid, as was more the case for the first couple of weeks I spent cleaning this place out.

I was gonna just call it quits and forget about the whole thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure I did for a while. I remember a small stretch of time where I had all but forgotten about the thing, until Onewinged suddenly brought it back up. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had assumed he’s just forgotten about it too with all of his school work piling high atop him, as such things tend to do. So when he asked me to go back out and start building the place up again, I didn’t think anything of it. He was just revitalizing the old plan. He did that sort of thing. Start one project, forget about it for a while, work on something else, then come back to the old one when that started getting boring. Classic cycle of madness from a genius with attention deficit disorder.

I had no reason to assume that this was any different.

...but I was wrong.